I still remember the phone call. It was a Tuesday evening, and my neighbour Carol rang me sounding like she’d seen a ghost. “Someone’s trying to sell my house,” she said. “My house. The one I’ve lived in for twenty-two years.”
Turns out, a fraudster had got hold of enough of Carol’s personal details to impersonate her, forge some paperwork, and quietly start the process of putting her home on the market without her knowing a single thing about it. If a sharp-eyed conveyancer hadn’t flagged something odd in the paperwork, she might have found out only when a “new owner” turned up at her door with a set of keys.
What Is Seller Impersonation Fraud, Exactly?
Carol’s situation has a name: seller impersonation fraud. It’s when a criminal pretends to be a property owner, usually using stolen or leaked personal information, in order to sell or remortgage a property that isn’t theirs. It tends to target homes that are easiest to act on quietly properties owned outright with no mortgage, homes left empty for periods of time, rental properties where the landlord isn’t around day to day, and properties belonging to people living abroad. If any of that sounds like your situation, it’s worth reading our piece on how landlords with empty rentals are being targeted, since the risk factors overlap heavily.
What scared me most wasn’t the fraud itself, it was how normal everything looked from the outside. No broken windows, no dodgy phone calls to Carol directly, nothing that would have made her suspicious in the moment. The whole thing was happening entirely on paper, behind her back, while life carried on as usual.
The Small Signs We Missed
Looking back, there were a couple of odd little things in the weeks before a letter that seemed to go missing, a call from someone “confirming details” that Carol brushed off as a scam call and hung up on. At the time none of it seemed connected. In hindsight, those were exactly the kind of quiet warning signs that these frauds rely on going unnoticed. We’ve written a fuller breakdown of the specific signs to watch for in 5 weird signs your house might be being sold behind your back, if you want the complete list.
Why This Is Becoming More Common
This isn’t a one-off, unlucky story. Fraud levels across the UK have been climbing, with millions of incidents recorded in the past year alone, and property-related fraud specifically continues to make headlines even though only a small fraction of Land Registry applications turn out to be fraudulent. The value at risk per case, though, tends to be huge, because it’s someone’s entire home on the line rather than a smaller transaction.
What Actually Stopped It
The one thing that would have caught Carol’s situation earlier, rather than relying on a conveyancer noticing something odd by chance, is being notified the moment anything changes on a property’s official record. That’s genuinely all it takes: an early warning so you (or someone helping you) can step in and stop things before they get anywhere near a completed sale.
What Carol Wishes She’d Done Sooner
Carol’s case worked out in the end. But she’s told me since that she wishes she’d had something watching her property before it happened, not after the fact. If you’ve read this far and you’re thinking “wait, could this actually happen to me?” the honest answer is yes, it could happen to almost anyone, regardless of how careful you think you are.
The good news is that setting up that kind of protection takes minutes, not days. If you’d rather not deal with the sign-up process yourself, we can walk you through it and get your property protected today.
Disclosure: this article is written by Property Alert Service, a commercial company that helps customers sign up for property monitoring in exchange for a small administration fee. We are not HM Land Registry or part of the UK Government, and a free version of this monitoring is also available directly from HM Land Registry.